Browsed byCategory: Another Variety

So it’s the end of the year and most people do some sort of sum-ups of the year, and I am no different. I think it’s an interesing excercise to make. End of year sum-ups or birthday sum-ups or whatever sum-ups one chooses to do on a regular bases are good because they help reflect on what was acheived and analyse whether the path that was chosen is satisfying.

I really liked 2017, from personal point of view it has been a great year with good balance between my work, family and personal interests (including games) and this is something to really make a person happy (in my opinion).

From my games point of view it has been a great year as well. Even though I know my games aren’t perfect and there’s so much that could be improved. But when I look at where I started and where I am now, I really like where it has led me. I think I might have achieved a level of skills that enables me to more or less express what I want to say. Obviously there’s still lot’s of stuff that I’ll need to learn like shaders, better sound design, the physics engine… but they are no longer obstacles to expression, but rather add some interesting challange that I need to overcome in each game I make.

My game jam games from 2017

I worked on 7 games in 2017. And 6 of them were published and created during game jams:

Feed of Comfort created for #ResistJam in March, which was a very cool jam, and the game is my statement on some feel-good hypocrisy of the western world

The Fifth Exponent – ridiculous adventure in space of some very quirky characters created for #LDJAM39, that is an unfinished prototype and rather unplayable because of lacking features but that was very well received in humor (ranked #34).

Supertone created for #MusicGameJam in September, a playable but unfinished prototype of a giant synth pad floor that I’m not going to work on, but that was cool to make as it was my first 3D game that I have released

My Sunshinecreated for #AsylumJam and 1+1=3Jam, very experimental and personal game on parenthood that was a joy to make and where I had some help from a little boy named Henk and his father Marcel

Where The Grains Are a poetic game created for #LDJAM40 (ranked #31 in graphics and #36 in mood!) where I worked with Loreleï who created the beautiful graphics. And we would like to make a post-jam version of it.

It turns out that people generally enjoyed the moody athmosphere or the humour of my games. For someone that genuinly would like to create some meaningful experiences in games, this is a really cool feedback!

In 2017 I also continued to work on my bigger game Another Variety which was all in 2D pixel art in the beginning of the year. Since then I have moved it into 3D to suit better the experience I aim for (being all alone and locked up to die), which resulted in some narrative changes as well. To be honest I don’t know if I ever am going to release this game. I think that it could be a very cool game, the story is original, the outcomes will all be meaningfull and it would make an interesting narrative experience. But the amount of work exceeds the time I can devote to it. So right now it serves me as a sandbox project where I test some ideas and learn 3D modelling, lightning and developpement, but nothing showable has yet resulted from it (except for the work in progress screenshot below).

Very erly WIP from Another Variety – tests of lightning

So 2018 what are you going to be? I hope to finish post-jam versions of The Fifth Exponent and Where The Grains Are. I worked on the Fifth Exponent for 2 months after LDJAM and then left it at 97% completion and just can’t get back to it since (motivation…).
For Where The Grains Are Loreleï is preparing more polished graphics and I’ll add a few features, it’s in good position to be released this year.

I’d also like to do a few jams this year but it might be a bit complicated. So it would be cool to do all the LDJAMs, I’m also planing to do the Global Game Jam in January, and maybe a few more jams on the itch.io like the self-care jam or remember the dead (I missed these this year and I regret), maybe a jam or two from the game dev network or the meta game jam. There is the Twine Game Jam that starts this friday with a long time to create, so no pressure, I’ll maybe give it a shot as well. And I think that that’s a lot already 😀

It’s been a while that I’ve been working on a post-apocalyptical game called “Another Variety”. It is a first person non-linear narrative game set in an undefined future in an underground laboratory of a reasearch institute. You wake up from hibernation to discover that the lab was abandonded and there is no one else left. You were supposed to hibernate for one year only as an experiment, yet the calendar shows that 25 years have passed. Will you find out what happened? And if you do, will you still want to leave the lab?

This was supposed to be a simple game loosely inspired by a novel by Philip K Dick I wanted to release in a few months but turns out it’s already been more than a year that I’m working on it. Creating takes lot’s of time and effort and I’m not only talking about limited time ressource I can actually devote to game development (family, life & work priorities come first). What initialy was a simple idea got bigger, with several endings. While detailing the scenario on paper I started to dig more and more into the subject. Somewhere last year I also passed from Actionscript to Unity while I already had a working prototype in the former… and I completely reworked the gameplay.

I have also changed the graphics style like 4 times maybe. I have been searching for the style but I also had to improve my skills. As I think I may have achived the style I was looking for, now I just need to create all the graphics… *sigh*

Anyway as I’m now content enough with the style I will be gradually uploading some graphics and screenshots and maybe even a video game trailer or a simple demo/prototype (but don’t expect those too soon though…).
So please stay tuned.